how to avoid a circular xref

[dlilborn]

My company does landscape architecture. We reference the Civil Engineering drawings into our drawing, which we call MASTER. Our MASTER has the survey as an xref. The Civil Engineer needs to work on our MASTER, but we don't want to give him direct access. In the past we have used dead references, by which I mean they get a copy of ours every once in awhile, and we get the same from them. Now we want live references in Dropbox. How can he xref our MASTER when it has Civil as a reference? I am sure other people make this work, but my mind won't wrap around it.....
thanks.

[cadtag]

use Overlay rather than Attach as the xref attachment method...

[BlackBox]

use Overlay rather than Attach as the xref attachment method...

Certainly as default setting for your production Profile(s)... 1+

[dlilborn]

So I tried an example. I made a MASTER, with SURVEY xref'd as attach, and CIVIL xref'd as attach.
then I opened CIVIL, and xref'd MASTER as overlay. AutoCAD detected circular refs, which I allowed. CIVIL displayed MASTER and it's xref SURVEY.
Then I made changes to MASTER, and to CIVIL, each of which showed up on the other ones.
When I closed MASTER and reopened it, it did not notify me about the circular reference, but did continue to show CIVIL.

am I going to run into problems later?
thanks.

[dkoch]

SURVEY and CIVIL should be overlays in MASTER, so that when MASTER is referenced into either SURVEY or CIVIL, there are no circular references.

However, having done it the other way, when you said to continue, if you looked at the Command: line, you would have seen a statement that the circular reference to CIVIL was broken. Apparently, that is remembered, and on future reloads or reopens, the reference will be broken again. AutoCAD does not support circular references, but will now apparently break them for you, if you tell it to continue with the reference anyway.

[dlilborn]

ok, so what I need to do is overlay CIVIL into MASTER, but attach SURVEY into MASTER. That is because the person who works in CIVIL needs to see MASTER and SURVEY together. No one will be working in SURVEY. Thanks for helping me understand this.
thanks, Donna